IKEA Wants You To Straighten Up Your Studio Already And Get Your Gear Off The #%!@?! Dinner Table

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9–bFPxKg3E

It looks like IKEA has figured out that there are a lot of musicians repurposing the company’s cheap home furnishings to straighten up their music studios.

They created this promo that looks at how they helped DJ Harry Love deal with his obsession for vinyl, straighten up his studio and maybe even save his relationship.

The studio makeover is actually pretty spiffy, especially the way they used shoe racks to make an awesome keyboard stack.

If you’ve got your own IKEA hack, let us know in the comments!

Here are the items they feature:

  • EXPEDIT shelving units to store his thousands of records
  • STOLMEN shoe racks to store his keyboards
  • KVISSLE cable management box to tame his web of cables
  • FÖRHÖJA cutlery tray to organise the floppy discs he wants to keep

via Oliver Chesler, Paul Eastwest Berlin

62 thoughts on “IKEA Wants You To Straighten Up Your Studio Already And Get Your Gear Off The #%!@?! Dinner Table”

  2. Uncanny the Timing. actually had this discussion againwith my gf. We were thinking again where to put all my stuff in. Synthtopia to the rescue. Some nice ideas ,especially the bench for the decks. Cheers

    1. I also have 13 foot ceilings. I bought one of their tables, a heavy weight one with a metal frame and then ran the stolmen poles from the table up to the ceiling. Worked amazingly well. Under the table I put a drawer unit with a shelf on rollers where my Multimoog sits. The thing I did differently though was I didnt use those shelves for the synth. They’re amazingly flimsy with a little bit of a weld on the bracket. Instead I got a Jasper synth stand and used the poles as the cross section with the jasper synth holders. Its brilliant.

      If you do this you need to make sure the table cant be moved. Mine is wedged into a corner with nowhere to go. If it moves, your shelf falls down!

    2. Try looking into vitsoe shelves. They are more expensive l, but may work for your situation. They’re also more beautiful. 😀 thanks dieter rams.

  4. Wow, its crazy how similar this is to my basement setup. Using the metal (capita?) legs and a cut shelf across ’em, to make two 1’x1’ish platforms worked super well for monitor stands, and the expedit shelves with the right sized bins are super good for cables and instrument hardware, or just alone for vinyls and trumpet mutes and stuff. There’s probably a way to arrange anything you could possiby want!

    1. Me too, the happy feeling from this video is sidelined by a sense of being almost targeted…but better that, than feeling all out of place I guess! 😀

  10. “to organise the floppy discs he wants to keep”

    Of course he wants to keep the floppies! Doesn’t the rack Akai sampler he has use floppies for the sample memory?

    1. Why still use the floppies if you can change the drive in your synths and samplers for a floppy emulator that eats SD cards? It might be a pain in a transition but at least the damn things works any single time and I do not have to worry that my precious samples can still be read of if the sampler decided to have a bad day and eat my floppies. If I’d still be using an Atari I’d have converted that as well. The old drives keep dying and I feel that it’s a much better solution to replace broken or breaking parts and also create some room for other stuff (like cables you can put into those drawers full of floppies) in the process.

        1. I dunno, *thunk* usually means a component or three are slowly being worn out. I think the teeny *click* of an SD card means it’ll hold up longer. Besides, those wonderful little suckers are huge, so I rarely need to swap one out. I’ve been slow but steady about converting and recycling my old floppies. Weiss Domains syndrome killed a few anyway. I loved my floppies, but now its on bloody THUMB drives. Its a lot of magic for just a few bucks a pop, innit? Awww, look, the Jetsons and TRON had a baby and it has a mohawk made of fiber optics, theremin antennae & USB sticks.

  14. A Rast plus a cheap drill is all you need to make a very inexpensive modular rack too. To any impecunious musicians I always say “get a Rast” when asked about inexpensive ways to start a modular.

  15. Ahh, ikea. You used to be cool. Then we found out you used POWs to make furniture back in the day.
    Anyhoo, My main beef with them is that their build quality has gone way down, a least in the US, but prices are the same.
    I’m slowly getting rid of all of the Ikea furniture we collected in our apt living days now that We own a house, and we don’t regret it. They just start falling apart after a few years.

  18. So…those rumors that IKEA is buying Reaper to give it for free with one of their multi tiered desks might be true after all. “The DIY DAW” was it to be called, they say…

  19. Hi Guys,

    I have a “DJ booth” where I’m using an EXPEDIT http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/50103086/ with a LACK TV BENCH http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/40105340/

    From the TV BENCH I just used the top part and the little feet to create a gap between the TV BENCH and the EXPEDIT. In this gap I add some LED lights.

    I didn’t assembled all the shelves in the EXPEDIT, The middle is empty where I have a M-Audio BX10s Sub. I also add some hangers for headphone and cables.

    For the speakers and computer, I have a LACK shelf on the wall. It’s pretty cool and the high is perfect for me.

    Cheers!

  20. I work with a master chair, and furniture maker, 35 years of experience making top quality furniture for the likes of Linley, Conran etc. Ikea’s the first place he looks for something suitable for himself when he needs something, ‘Can’t buy the wood for that much money”, is his usual refrain.
    Having said that, if you’ve got some money proper wooden fitted furniture lasts, can be fixed and be modified easily, and just keeps on gaining patina; or you can refinish it in whatever fashion. Once cheap MDF/ chipboard furniture breaks, it’s probably f**ked. Edgings peel etc. after a while anyway. Wooden surroundings, I feel, are far more organic, less like a shop fitting.

  21. IKEA is a bad company that used east germany to have slaves with no real wages work for them. They also heed no sympathy for ecological issues.

    1. It’s one thing to be (rightfully) upset about something the company did in the 1980s. It’s another to be upset about the company actively logging ancient forests in Russia by Swedwood. I’d rather have 600 year old trees than cheap furniture. Ikea, you can do better than that.

      Thanks for alerting everyone to this issue. I always thought they were green. Effective greenwashing, I guess.

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/29/ikea-ancient-tree-logging

    2. You have to judge companies by current practices and IKEA seems to be a pretty good company.

      IBM supplied the Nazi’s with gear, but that was a different time. .

      I’d worry more about companies like CISCO supplying China, Syria, Saudia Arabia, etc with network gear to spy on the countries’ people.

  24. those sheves for the keys rate at 55lbs each on the site (which was actually a suprise) and are wedged via extensions to floor and ceiling – unless they are modified i dont feel thats ‘safe’. the mpc’s shelves are a combo of their $9 wood shelf and $20 of mounting plastic (per shelf) so no weight rating, but seems a bit more ‘legit’. definatly sharp and organized – but i dont think id even trust controllers on those shoe racks, let alone heavy/vintage synths.

    1. Agreed. I have a similar set up, but didnt use those shoe racks. Went to buy them but couldnt believe how flimsy they were and how likely it looked that the bracket would snap off. Instead I used a Jaspers A-Frame synth stand and cut it up. Seems extreme, but I needed to organise my space and at 120 euro or something for a 4 tier stand it was a bargain. I used the horizontal bar from the stand, with the synth holders in place, instead of the shoe racks. Works perfect and you can adjust the angle of the synth safe in the knowledge that you wont hear a CRASH in the night.

  25. Check out the IKEA Broder System (unfortunatelly discontinued last year). Much better than Stolmen. It is very stable and flexible system. It can hold my heavy Yamaha CS50 + and 20 other kayboards. I wish they make something similar or find the company that produced the system.

  27. Love the idea behind this video. Though there is a bit of false advertising… In reality the Stolmen shoe racks that are shown 3:19 are way too flimsy to safely hold any synth you care about. I bought this system today and put my Roland Juno-6 (24 lbs / 11kg) on it, only to find out within minutes the metal bent and cracked at the welds.The Stolmen shelves on the other hand seem to work fine.?

  29. About a year ago we were looking at doing up our home studio. We costed out the materials to build work tops and shelves and it was going to be well over £100. Then by chance I hit on the idea of stacking the ikea Lack tables. We bought 8 of them, stacked them one on top of another i.e 2 up, 4 along and now have a really good workbench and storage space. They are about the height of a keyboard stand. Fits the room well and because they only cost a fiver each, we did the lot for 40 quid instead of over a hundred.

    The tables are strong enough but light, so a little bit of glue on the bottom of the legs of the top tables is enough to keep them in place. I’ve got 2, 27Kg active PA speakers sitting on the bottom ones with no problems. So they are pretty strong.

  30. I tried the STOLMEN show racks idea, but as with other commentors, I thought they were too flimsy for heavy (particularly vintage) gear. On the other hand, My whole studio is basically set up using the BRODER system, which is intended for much more heavy duty use AND came with angled brackets. Sadly, IKEA have stopped making the angled brackets now. There is a healthy Ebay trade in BRODER stuff….

  31. Can you please take a look at my set up and help me remodel it. I hated my basement ever since I moved here. I want the atmosphere to be conducive for music…. Please!!!????????????

  32. Rast nightstand + 8 space rack rails and a drill = pretty nice 8 space rack for super cheap that’s great to stack on top of a desk or stacked on the floor with casters on the bottom and braces on the back to keep them together. I have 3 of them. So far…

  36. Ikea no longer sell the STOLMEN show racks. Any idea on a suitable alternative for holding light weight synth modules?

    All the best

    Andy

  37. Unfortunately, Ikea no longer sell STOLMEN show racks. Any idea on a similar alternative for holding lightweight synth modules?

    All the best

    Andy

  40. I thought that I’d found a perfect solution for my synths using the Stolmen… such a shame that it’s discontinued. Back to the drawing board.

    1. to anyone looking later… Elvarli system will work. If you want synths larger than 30″ though, you’ll have to buy the shoe rack shelf and then replace it with your own wood shelf angle. I did this, then added cabinet pulls hardware for the lip to hold it. Adding your own shel’ves makes the Elvarli system super cheap

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